Seagate will release 20TB HDDs with pmr technology later this year

Seagate expects to ship 20TB hard drives in the second half of this year. This is still about perpendicular magnetic recording based hard drives, but Seagate also comes with 20TB hard drives based on SMR and Hamr.

Seagate expects to begin shipping 20TB drives in the second half of 2021 as Seagate CEO Dave Mosley expressed in a post The company’s quarterly results. In response to questions, he explained that he expects production, sampling and qualification of 20TB PMR hard drives to continue, as Seagate already produces heads and storage media for 18TB and lower capacity PMR drives on a large scale.

In addition, he reported that Seagate will come with several 20 TB platforms, and also with hard drives based on SMR and Hamr. “There are many different flavors and they target different customers, so they each have their own qualification schedule,” Mosley said according to Text on search for alpha. Thus, the rendering periods of 20 different TBs are not yet known.

In fact, Seagate already has 20TB hamr-based hard drives available, but only to a select group of customers. The manufacturer does not yet produce it in large numbers, since it becomes cost-effective only with 24 TB and higher storage capacities.

PMR is the traditional technique in which magnetic fields stand upright on the surface of the disk. The limits in terms of storage density are shown here. This storage density can be slightly increased by applying magnetic interleaved recording, in which the data paths partially overlap.

This SMR technology is already used, but it has some disadvantages in terms of performance. Hamr stands for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a complex and expensive technology that Seagate has been working on for years and should ensure a higher storage density. Hamr uses laser writing heads. Tweaker was published last year Background article on Hamr hdds.